Phaedrus

Phaedrus is definitely the most complex dialog I've read so far, and it's easy to imagine that it lies on the cusp between Plato's middle and late period.  We'll have to come back to this question after reading the later dialogs.  What makes Phaedrus so complicated is the way its various literary parts seem to fit together, but not in an obvious way.  

It begins with an unusual literary setting.  Socrates is walking alone with Phaedrus outside the city; the two stop to rest from the heat of the day under a tree, which is where the conversation takes place.  Since most of Plato's dialogs are group conversations, and all of them take place within city limits, it's a noteworthy set-up that allows for the question of how all kinds of nature spirits -- river nymphs, prophetic trees, mad cicadas -- relate to both the gods and the Forms.  

This isn't the only oddity of the dialog though.  The first half contains three separate speeches arguing both sides of an issue.  The question is whether a young boy should accept an older consort who is deliriously in love with him, or whether it wouldn't be better to choose a more level-headed mentor who doesn't love him, but might have more to offer.  The first of the speeches -- in praise of choosing the non-lover, the mere beneficial friend -- is composed by Phaedrus' friend Lysias.  Socrates invents a second to argue the same point.  However, he immediately goes on to disavow his own speech on the ground that it impiously demeans love.  He then supplies a third speech which takes the other side and praises the madness of the true lover.   In the course of his defense of love, he elaborates another version of the myth of metempsychosis to show how this madness is divinely inspired.  All this long speechmaking is pretty rare for Socrates, particularly since it comes in the beginning and middle of the dialog.  

Finally, the remaining half of the dialog is also unique because of the explicitly meta-level reflection it provides on the act of making speeches.  Socrates and Phaedrus go on to discuss, now in dialectical, question and answer fashion, what makes for a good or bad speech.  This section recapitulates and extends the arguments we saw already in Gorgias.  Now though, we see the evaluation of rhetoric applied directly to Lysias' and Socrates' earlier speeches.  These are judged on how well they fulfill the ideal of rhetoric as an art that matches the correct type of speech to the correct type of soul.  The discussion culminates in a distinction between speaking and writing that we haven't seen in any other dialog so far.  Socrates is explicitly critical of writing.  It dulls our memory of real speech, it cannot respond to questions, and most importantly, it cannot be individually tailored to its audience.  In what seems like a moment of high Platonic irony, he dismisses all writing as mere amusement.  Seems we've been eating grass this whole time!

The dialog is full of interesting and beautiful passages, as well as some really puzzling moments.  I'll leave the summary at this high level though, because it seems to me more interesting to try and integrate the parts into an overall picture.  On some basic level, I think everything in Phaedrus revolves around the theme of possession, in the sense of being possessed or animated or inspired or driven mad by.  Interestingly, the question is not so much whether we want to be possessed or in our right minds, but what we want to be possessed by.  It's as if there's already a 'spirit world' that animates everything, and our choice lies only in what type of spirit to be animated by.   We can be possessed by the local gods of opinion, and by our desire for pleasure, or we can be possessed by the Forms and our philosophical love of Beauty.  In either case, there's a certain passivity in Plato.  We already came across this in the gender confusion, as it were, of the lover and loved in the Symposium.   Here though, the sexual imagery attached to the older lover is even more explicit.  But at the same time its origin in a divinely inspired mad love of Beauty is made clearer.  The dominant male lover turns out to be himself completely possessed.  This passivity runs throughout the theory of Forms and the idea of metempsychosis in a way that I didn't appreciate before.  It's not that people have souls and things have Forms -- Forms have things just as souls have people. 

The first hint we get for this theme of possession is in the literary setting itself.  Nature abounds with spirits in a way that the city does not.  References to these various spirits are scattered throughout the dialog.  Socrates and Phaedrus sit to talk near the spot where the North Wind, Boreas, abducted a girl (229c).  A river god and nymphs still seem to hover around the area (230c).  Phaedrus even notes that Socrates seems out of place in this natural setting.

PHAEDRUS: And you, my remarkable friend, appear to be totally out of place. Really, just as you say, you seem to need a guide, not to be one of the locals. Not only do you never travel abroad—as far as I can tell, you never even set foot beyond the city walls.
SOCRATES: Forgive me, my friend. I am devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me—only the people in the city can do that. (230d)

It is possessed by nymphs (241e), inspired by Muses (237a), "filled, like an empty jar, by the words of other people streaming in through [his] ears" (235d), and with a little help from Phaedrus and his tree-god (236e), that Socrates is forced to speak .  And indeed, so strangely animated, he covers his head in shame and gives his strange and un-Socratic speech denigrating love.  He defines love as a desire for pleasure that overwhelms our judgement about what is best for us and for the lover.  Love is a form of madness that wants to turn the lover into a mere tool for gratification.   Just as Lysias argued, Socrates claims the loved would be wise to have nothing to do with the lover, since the lover only aims to keep the boy a slave to his appetites.  

But these animistic spirits and voices of other poets aren't the only spirits out there.  Immediately after he finishes speaking, Socrates' own daimon warns him not to leave before offering an apology (a Palinode) to the god of Love he slandered with his first speech.  Inspired by another spirits, he produces a completely different speech.  He begins by explaining how what we call madness, or the 'manic', is really a form of possession by the gods.  He then defines love as a particular type of divinely inspired madness.  From there, he goes on to give a new version of the myth of metempsychosis that explains how the philosopher, triggered by Beauty, is driven mad for the love of a Wisdom that his soul glimpsed before he was born.  Since this is the main speech of the dialog, we should spend a little more time on it, even though it tells a story of love substantially similar to the one in the Symposium.

First, Socrates argues that, because the soul is self-moving, it always remains in motion, and is hence immortal.  In fact, ceaseless movement is the very definition of what make something a soul.  This obviously fits well with Abram's link between the spirit and the constant movement of air as we breathe.  As we've already seen, everything in this natural setting is literally animated by the 'inspiration' of this constant circulation.  Socrates is going to give us a story of what distinguishes the human soul in this all encompassing spiritual world.  

All souls are like a chariot driver who steers a chariot pulled by a tame good horse and a wild bad one.  When a soul has wings it can fly up into the realm of the gods, but when it loses its wings it falls down and gets stuck in a mortal body.  Experiencing beauty and goodness and justice while in mortal form make the wings grow but confronting ugliness makes them shrink.  The benefit of having well developed wings is that a soul can fly higher into the realm of the gods and participate in their ritual procession around the rim of heaven.  The gods have only good horses, so they easily drive their chariots up the steep hill to the rim of heaven and look out beyond it into the realm of Forms.  So the Forms are in a sense even beyond the gods and other spirits.  Now, if we tame our bad horse, our wings will be strong enough to carry us to the rim as well, but most souls don't manage this, so they never see the reality of the forms, and are stuck with only their own opinions.  The stronger the soul's wings, the more of reality it sees in its flight through heaven.  This results in a higher 'level' when it returns to take human form -- Socrates tells us of 9 levels of human soul, ranging from philosophers (at the top, obviously) to tyrants.  All souls that return in human form have seen at least some of the reality of the Forms.  Our ability to speak implies a certain familiarity with general forms that distinguishes our souls from those that return as animals.

But a soul that never saw the truth cannot take a human shape, since a human being must understand speech in terms of general forms, proceeding to bring many perceptions together into a reasoned unity.  That process is the recollection of the things our soul saw when it was traveling with god, when it disregarded the things we now call real and lifted up its head to what is truly real instead.  (249c).  

All souls circulate through this system, being reborn many times in different bodies.  The goal is to be born at the highest level and thereby have a chance to snatch the best view of the reality of the Forms after death.  Clearly there's a feedback loop at work here, but there's also some amount of choice involved in the process, even if you have the luck of being reborn as a human.

The question is how we can tame our bad horse, live a better life, and give our soul wings.  Naturally, this is exactly the goal of philosophy, whose reward isn't so much peace in the afterlife, as another life just like this one.  Through discussion, we try to remember the unity of the Forms we glimpsed by seeing them reflected or embodied in the diversity of appearances around us.  The key to this process turns out to be the Form of Beauty, which draws us into discussion with young boys.  As we saw in the Symposium, Beauty is first among forms, the trigger that leads us to a love of wisdom, because it is the easiest Form to see shining out from within the objects of our appearance.  The older lover is possessed by this vision of Beauty; the loved boy reminds him of the Form he saw in his last circuit through heaven.   Plato's imagery here is explicitly erotic.  Seeing Beauty makes the soul sprout wings in exactly the way that seeing a beautiful boy gives an old man a hard on (251b).    The lovers' bad horse just wants to pork the boy, but with time, the chariot driver can learn to hold his horses and reach a chaste love of Beauty itself.  So, paradoxically, the lover is controlling himself only in order to be more fully mad, more fully possessed by love of Beauty itself, which he sees shining through the loved.  The philosopher's mortification of the bad horse, the way he denies himself the sexual pleasure of the boy, is not an end in itself, but a means to getting off at a higher level.   Again, it's not a question of whether to be possessed, but what to be possessed by -- pleasure or Beauty

The story of the soul's ascent to the realm of Forms ends by coming full circle.  Eventually, the boy begins to see how much good this mad lover can do his soul and also falls in love.  If both sides of the couple tame their bad horses of sensual pleasure, they can learn to love each other philosophically, Platonically, each seeing the Form of Beauty reflected in the image of the other, and both souls can grow wings.  So again, we see that both the lover and loved become conduits of a sort that complete a cycle.  The soul of the lover gains its wings only by planting the seeds of wisdom in the loved, and the loved only begins his groping ascent towards the Forms under the inspiration of his lover.  The machinery of metempsychosis seems to always be coupled to the machinery of love, and both require a pair -- life/death and loved/lover -- to operate.  This conjoined active/passive pair reappears over and over again in Plato, and results in a sort of gender euphoria, if you will.

After the end of Socrates' second speech, the dialog shifts tone completely.  With the myth he usually reserves for the finale out of the way unusually early, Plato moves into the classic question and answer format where Socrates begins drawing distinctions.  It's pretty easy to see the theme of possession running through both the form and content everything I've covered so far.  All three speeches assume love as a form of madness.  And all of the speakers are possessed in various ways.  Socrates by nymphs and voices in one case, and by Love and his daimon in the other.  Even Lysias' speech possesses Phaedrus, transporting him into ecstasy (234d), and Lysias himself was probably possessed by the love of the boy he wrote the speech for, despite his cunning claim to the contrary (237b).

The idea of possession is less immediately apparent in the second, dialectical, half of the dialog, which appears to be all about the art of rhetoric.  Socrates tries to define rhetoric, and then apply this definition to the speeches we've seen, and even self-referentially to the writing of the dialog itself.  It's not immediately obvious how this relates to the idea of madness.  Lurking under the surface of this discussion, however, is the question of what possessed you to speak in the first place.  As I said earlier, in Phaedrus, it's not a question of whether you are possessed by spirits or not, it's only a question of which spirits.  Just as Socrates' competing speeches on love were inspired by two different types of spirits, speech in general can be inspired by distinct spirits and will be constructed in different ways as a result.

As if to emphasize the point of contact, Plato inserts a curios literary device at just this point of transition from rhetoric to dialectic. The cicadas.  With the speeches over, Socrates and Phaedrus debate whether to discuss what makes for good and bad writing in general.  

SOCRATES: ... It seems we clearly have the time. Besides, I think that the cicadas, who are singing and carrying on conversations with one another in the heat of the day above our heads, are also watching us. And if they saw the two of us avoiding conversation at midday like most people, diverted by their song and, sluggish of mind, nodding off, they would have every right to laugh at us, convinced that a pair of slaves had come to their resting place to sleep like sheep gathering around the spring in the afternoon. But if they see us in conversation, steadfastly navigating around them as if they were the Sirens, they will be very pleased and immediately give us the gift from the gods they are able to give to mortals.
PHAEDRUS: What is this gift? I don't think I have heard of it.
SOCRATES: Everyone who loves the Muses should have heard of this. The story goes that the cicadas used to be human beings who lived before the birth of the Muses. When the Muses were born and song was created for the first time, some of the people of that time were so overwhelmed with the pleasure of singing that they forgot to eat or drink; so they died without even realizing it. It is from them that the race of the cicadas came into being; and, as a gift from the Muses, they have no need of nourishment once they are born. Instead, they immediately burst into song, without food or drink, until it is time for them to die. After they die, they go to the Muses and tell each one of them which mortals have honored her. To Terpsichore they report those who have honored her by their devotion to the dance and thus make them dearer to her. To Erato, they report those who honored her by dedicating themselves to the affairs of love, and so too with the other Muses, according to the activity that honors each. And to Calliope, the oldest among them, and Urania, the next after her, who preside over the heavens and all discourse, human and divine, and sing with the sweetest voice, they report those who honor their special kind of music by leading a philosophical life. (259a)

Even the cicadas are possessed in this dialog.  And they try to possess us in turn, like Sirens, dulling our mind and steering it towards their sleepy music.  It's only by ignoring these lower level nature spirits, focusing on the discussions that constitute a philosophical life, that we can please the gods and rise towards the Forms.  In other words, we should avoid being possessed by these local spirits of the place in favor of being inspired by greater, more abstract spirits.

This question of what inspires a speech and defines its goal sets the stage for the discussion of speaking and writing that follows.  Do you need to know the truth to speak artfully, or it is enough to merely worry about what convinces the crowd?  Socrates presents arguments very similar to those in Gorgias, where he distinguished a true art from a mere 'knack'.  Even if you wish to deceive folks, he claims, you have to understand how to confuse people with superficially similar things, so you have to know something about what can be seen as similar.  After all, if you don't know anything at all, how can you even predict what the crowd's reaction will be?  How could you then lead them to believe one thing versus another, whatever you wish, in fact?  This is the art of rhetoric, one we've already seen demonstrated by Socrates' conflicting speeches.  Lysias' speech fails to rise to even this level of deceptive artifice.  It doesn't start with a definition of love so it cannot coerce us into seeing love the way it wants us to.  Socrates also claims it has no logical order, and doesn't make an organic whole of its parts.  In short, the speech seems unaware of its audience and is just constructed from Lysias' stream of consciousness.

Even Socrates' first speech is better than this because at least it defines love and then proceeds to examine its consequences.  His second speech, however, is much better because it is more dialectical -- it gathers together various seemingly unrelated behaviors (prophecy, mysticism, poetry, and philosophy) as types of madness and distinguishes one from another, reaching a definition of love as a byproduct of this more complete overview.  This is the first time we've seen the dialectic mentioned in Plato, so it bears a moment of examination.  The purpose of the dialectic is two-fold.  It gathers together, and it splits apart.  Together these procedures create an organic unity of thought that carves nature at its joints. 

SOCRATES: The first consists in seeing together things that are scattered about everywhere and collecting them into one kind, so that by defining each thing we can make clear the subject of any instruction we wish to give. Just so with our discussion of love: Whether its definition was or was not correct, at least it allowed the speech to proceed clearly and consistently with itself.
PHAEDRUS: And what is the other thing you are talking about, Socrates?
SOCRATES: This, in turn, is to be able to cut up each kind according to its species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do. In just this way, our two speeches placed all mental derangements into one common kind. Then, just as each single body has parts that naturally come in pairs of the same name (one of them being called the right-hand and the other the left-hand one), so the speeches, having considered unsoundness of mind to be by nature one single kind within us, proceeded to cut it up—the first speech cut its left-hand part, and continued to cut until it discovered among these parts a sort of love that can be called "left-handed," which it correctly denounced; the second speech, in turn, led us to the right-hand part of madness; discovered a love that shares its name with the other but is actually divine; set it out before us, and praised it as the cause of our greatest goods. (265d)

A rhetorical speech like Lysias gave might have some idea how to produces effects in the audience, but not when to apply those effects to create a coherent whole.  Socrates likens this to knowing the preliminaries of an art -- like how to make a musical harmony, or sketch a figure --  but not knowing the art itself, which results from composing with these preliminaries.  A true art of speaking would proceed dialectically.  And not just at the level of defining its subject matter but also at the level of its overall effect on the audience.  Socrates says that if there is an art to speaking it lies in understanding the different types of souls, the different types of speeches, and what type of speech should be used to use to move which type of soul.  In short, to speak, we need to have an organic view not only of the subject matter and the form of expression, but also of the audience of the speech.  We have to know who they are and what animates them.  Later, Socrates will examine another drawn from Tisias' book on rhetoric.  Tisias claims you don't need to know whether someone is really innocent or guilty to argue for them in court.  You just need to know what the jury is likely to believe.  So, for example, if you have a scrawny little guy accused of beating up a big strong guy, the path of your argument is clear.  Most of the jury will likely be of the opinion that this is an unlikely turn of events (273c).  Meanwhile, the big guy is unlikely to want to admit his cowardice.  Socrates points out that even Tysias, who claims to have no interest in what's true, has to go through a pretty exhaustive analysis of what an audience is truly likely to believe in his example.  In a sense then, he has to know what's similar to the truth, similar enough to convince the audience.

No one will ever possess the art of speaking, to the extent that any human being can, unless he acquires the ability to enumerate the sorts of characters to be found in any audience, to divide everything according to its kinds, and to grasp each single thing firmly by means of one form. And no one can acquire these abilities without great effort—a laborious effort a sensible man will make not in order to speak and act among human beings, but so as to be able to speak and act in a way that pleases the gods as much as possible. (273e)

For Socrates, any artful and convincing speech will have to proceed dialectically, at least at the level of analyzing the composition of its audience.  But since the goal is knowing how the audience is likely to react to certain ideas, you have to also have some image of how those ideas fit together, if not in the truth, at least in their reflection in the audience.  I think this is basically to say that this type of rhetorical speech is in some sense possessed by the local gods of opinion.  It is animated, or inspired, by a distorted image of truth reflected in the audience.  This is what breathes life into the speech and makes it work.  Isn't this just like being inspired by all those natural spirits floating around us?  The trees and rivers and cicadas with all their particular stories and customs?  In Gorgias, Socrates likened rhetoric to the blind leading the blind.  Here, it is closer to the idea of the Keynesian beauty contest -- each chimp tries to pick what they think the other chimps will pick.  The speech ends up doubly possessed by opinions and by the desire to convince, to move those opinions and win the contest.  It may use some of the methods of the dialectic, but without properly grounding the argument in a truth beyond opinion.  The result is a sort of hall of mirrors effect where the speaker is possessed by the crowd he purports to control.

By contrast, our speech could instead be possessed by love of the Forms.  These aren't local and relative, but absolute.  They aren't animistic and natural, but supernatural, beyond even the spirits of the gods themselves.  A speech like this is dialectical from top to bottom.  It still requires an analysis of its audience, but it also requires understanding the dialectic of the Forms themselves.  These are dialectical in themselves, joining together beautiful things in Beauty, but also splitting them apart into a hierarchy ascending from physical to spiritual beauty and from there to Beauty in itself.  A philosopher speaks like this, inspired by the divine madness of love of wisdom and the beauty that enables him to ascend towards it, just as Socrates was in his second speech.  In fact, isn't this simultaneous drawing together and splitting apart what Socrates claimed distinguished human souls and enable them to use language to begin with? (249c) 

It seems to me this contrast between two types of possession lies under everything in Phaedrus.  We might call it the madness of images versus the madness of  reality.  Plato give it one final twist at the end of the dialog with his discussion of the difference between speaking and writing.  Up to now, the text has vascillated back and forth on the question of whether "speaking well" includes both oral and written speech.  In some cases both are mentioned, in others just one.  A potential difference between the two is first explicitly opened up by a puzzling comment Socrates makes after his general explanation of how the dialectic applies to rhetoric.  

SOCRATES: It's very difficult to speak the actual words, but as to how one should write in order to be as artful as possible—that I am willing to tell you.
PHAEDRUS: Please do.
SOCRATES: Since the nature of speech is in fact to direct the soul, whoever intends to be a rhetorician must know how many kinds of soul there are. Their number is so-and-so many; each is of such-and-such a sort; hence some people have such-and-such a character and others have such-and- such. Those distinctions established, there are, in turn, so-and-so many kinds of speech, each of such-and-such a sort. People of such-and-such a character are easy to persuade by speeches of such-and-such a sort in connection with such-and-such an issue for this particular reason, while people of such-and-such another sort are difficult to persuade for those particular reasons.
The orator must learn all this well, then put his theory into practice and develop the ability to discern each kind clearly as it occurs in the actions of real life. Otherwise he won't be any better off than he was when he was still listening to those discussions in school. He will now not only be able to say what kind of person is convinced by what kind of speech; on meeting someone he will be able to discern what he is like and make clear to himself that the person actually standing in front of him is of just this particular sort of character he had learned about in school—to that he must now apply speeches of such-and-such a kind in this particular way in order to secure conviction about such-and-such an issue. (271d) 

Socrates can explain how to write artfully, but claims he doesn't "know how to speak the words".  But then he goes on to describe exactly how artful writing has to know its audience dialectically -- breaking down and matching up the souls to be moved and the speeches that move them -- and then says that the orator needs to put this same knowledge into practice.  Hasn't he just described both writing and speaking?  Hasn't he also gone some way towards explaining the collage of genres like poetry, myth and argument that we see in Plato's own writing, and particularly in Phaedrus?  Each of these different types of speech would be aimed at different types of souls.  

I'm not sure what to make of this odd line, but the question of writing versus speech recurs just a few pages later.  Socrates relates a story of how Teuth invented writing in Egypt.  Teuth thought that it was a wonderful way of improving our memory.  His king, Ammon, thought just the opposite; writing, he thought, would help remind us of things, but would actually weaken our memory as we came to rely instead on the written symbols.  Socrates thinks that the same logic applies to philosophical writing.  People will be reminded by the words only if they remember the ideas.  

SOCRATES: Well, then, those who think they can leave written instructions for an art, as well as those who accept them, thinking that writing can yield results that are clear or certain, must be quite naive and truly ignorant of Ammon's prophetic judgment: otherwise, how could they possibly think that words that have been written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about? (275d)

He goes on to point out that, since it can fall into anyone's hands, writing cannot really know its audience, nor can it defend itself and explain further.  Which means it doesn't fulfill the criteria laid out earlier for speaking well.  It is not living breathing discourse, but an image of it, a mere amusement.  Living speech instead employs the dialectic to choose a suitable soul in which to plant the seed of knowledge.

The dialectician chooses a proper soul and plants and sows within it discourse accompanied by knowledge—discourse capable of helping itself as well as the man who planted it, which is not barren but produces a seed from which more discourse grows in the character of others. Such discourse makes the seed forever immortal and renders the man who has it as happy as any human being can be. (277a)

So the dialectician uses speech in a way that reproduces the Form he remembers in another.  This is clearly just like the story Socrates told here and in the Symposium of the path of love.  Writing is really just a beautiful bauble that triggers our memory of the Forms; it's not meant to be taken seriously. 

SOCRATES: .... When he writes, it's likely he will sow gardens of letters for the sake of amusing himself, storing up reminders for himself "when he reaches forgetful old age" and for everyone who wants to follow in his footsteps, and will enjoy seeing them sweetly blooming. And when others turn to different amusements, watering themselves with drinking parties and everything else that goes along with them, he will rather spend his time amusing himself with the things I have just described. (276c)

Ultimately, to become a philosopher, we have to be possessed by the ideas behind the writing, rising above the seductively beautiful words on the page the way the lover, triggered by the beauty of the loved, becomes possessed by wisdom.  We don't want to just be possessed by the voice of the author, to literally breathe his words into existence as we read.  The written word only provides an image of knowledge.  Like the cicadas, it lulls us to sleep because it sings only one note forever.  Instead, we want to be possessed by the same Forms that possessed the author to begin with.  We only breathe life into these ideas if his words spawn more words from us, more living conversations amongst us.  This is precisely how the lover, pregnant with a wisdom that possesses him but he can never possess, gives birth 'in beauty' -- playfully, flirtatiously, but also chastely, inspired by the love of the Forms, not the pleasures of sex that might attend these conversations.

SOCRATES: On the other hand, take a man who thinks that a written discourse on any subject can only be a great amusement, that no discourse worth serious attention has ever been written in verse or prose, and that those that are recited in public without questioning and explanation, in the manner of the rhapsodes, are given only in order to produce conviction. He believes that at their very best these can only serve as reminders to those who already know. And he also thinks that only what is said for the sake of understanding and learning, what is truly written in the soul concerning what is just, noble, and good can be clear, perfect, and worth serious attention: Such discourses should be called his own legitimate children, first the discourse he may have discovered already within himself and then its sons and brothers who may have grown naturally in other souls insofar as these are worthy; to the rest, he turns his back. Such a man, Phaedrus, would be just what you and I both would pray to become. (278a)

SOCRATES: To call him wise, Phaedrus, seems to me too much, and proper only for a god. To call him wisdom's lover—a philosopher—or something similar would fit him better and be more seemly. (278d)

Since only the gods can possess wisdom, the question is instead what we want to be possessed by.  By the gods and Wisdom itself?  Or by the image of these we see in the world around us -- by the spirits of animals, of human opinions, or of words.